Thursday, March 8, 2012

After a year of bloodshed, the crisis in Syria has reached a decisive
moment. It is estimated that more than 7,500 lives have been lost. The
United Nations has declared that Syrian security forces are guilty of
crimes against humanity, including the indiscriminate shelling of
civilians, the execution of defectors, and the widespread torture of
prisoners. Bashar Al-Assad is now doing to Homs what his father did to
Hama. Aerial photographs procured by Human Rights Watch show a city that
has been laid to waste by Assad’s tanks and artillery. A British
photographer who was wounded and evacuated from the city described it as
“a medieval siege and slaughter.”

The kinds of mass atrocities that
NATO intervened in Libya to prevent in Benghazi are now a reality in
Homs. Indeed, Syria today is the scene of some of the worst
state-sponsored violence since Milosevic’s war crimes in the Balkans, or
Russia’s annihilation of the Chechen city of Grozny.

What is all the more astonishing is that Assad’s killing spree has
continued despite severe and escalating international pressure against
him. His regime is almost completely isolated. It has been expelled from
the Arab League, rebuked by the United Nations General Assembly,
excoriated by the U.N. Human Rights Council, and abandoned by nearly
every country that once maintained diplomatic relations with it. At the
same time, Assad’s regime is facing a punishing array of economic
sanctions by the United States, the European Union, the Arab League, and
others—measures that have targeted the assets of Assad and his
henchmen, cut off the Central Bank and other financial institutions,
grounded Syria’s cargo flights, and restricted the regime’s ability to
sell oil. This has been an impressive international effort, and the
Administration deserves a lot of credit for helping to orchestrate it.

The problem is, the bloodletting continues. Despite a year’s worth of
diplomacy backed by sanctions, Assad and his top lieutenants show no
signs of giving up and taking the path into foreign exile. To the
contrary, they appear to be accelerating their fight to the finish. And
they are doing so with the shameless support of foreign governments,
especially in Russia, China, and Iran. A steady supply of weapons,
ammunition, and other assistance is flowing to Assad from Moscow and
Tehran, and as TheWashington Post reported yesterday,
Iranian military and intelligence operatives are likely active in Syria,
helping to direct and sharpen the regime’s brutality.

The Security
Council is totally shut down as an avenue for increased pressure, and
the recently convened Friends of Syria contact group, while a good step
in principle, produced mostly rhetoric but precious little action when
it met last month in Tunisia. Unfortunately, with each passing day, the
international response to Assad’s atrocities is being overtaken by
events on the ground in Syria.

Some countries are finally beginning to acknowledge this reality, as
well as its implications. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are calling for arming
opposition forces in Syria. The newly-elected Kuwaiti parliament has
called on their government to do the same. Last week, the Supreme Allied
Commander of NATO, Admiral James Stavridis, testified to the Senate
Armed Services Committee that providing arms to opposition forces in
Syria could help them shift the balance of power against Assad. Most
importantly, Syrians themselves are increasingly calling for
international military involvement. The opposition Syrian National
Council recently announced that it is establishing a military bureau to
channel weapons and other assistance to the Free Syrian Army and armed
groups inside the country. Other members of the Council are demanding a
more robust intervention.

To be sure, there are legitimate questions about the efficacy of
military options in Syria, and equally legitimate concerns about their
risks and uncertainties. It is understandable that the Administration is
reluctant to move beyond diplomacy and sanctions. Unfortunately, this
policy is increasingly disconnected from the dire conditions on the
ground in Syria, which has become a full-blown state of armed conflict.
In the face of this new reality, the Administration’s approach to Syria
is starting to look more like a hope than a strategy. So, too, does
their continued insistence that Assad’s fall is “inevitable.” Tell that
to the people of Homs. Tell that to the people of Idlib, or Hama, or the
other cities that Assad’s forces are now moving against. Nothing in
this world is pre-determined. And claims about the inevitability of
events can often be a convenient way to abdicate responsibility.

But even if we do assume that Assad will ultimately fall, that may
still take a really long time. In recent testimony to the Senate Armed
Services Committee, the Director of National Intelligence, James
Clapper, said that if the status quo persists, Assad could hang on for
months, possibly longer. And that was before Homs fell. So just to be
clear: Even under the best-case scenario for the current policy, the
cost of success will likely be months of continued bloodshed and
thousands of additional lives lost. Is this morally acceptable to us? I
believe it should not be.

In addition to the moral and humanitarian interests at stake in
Syria, what is just as compelling, if not more so, are the strategic and
geopolitical interests. Put simply, the United States has a clear
national security interest in stopping the violence in Syria and forcing
Assad to leave power. In this way, Syria is very different than Libya: The stakes are far higher, both for America and some of our closest allies.

This regime in Syria serves as the main forward operating base of the
Iranian regime in the heart of the Arab world. It has supported
Palestinian terrorist groups and funneled arms of all kinds, including
tens of thousands of rockets, to Hezbollah in Lebanon. It remains a
committed enemy of Israel. It has large stockpiles of chemical weapons
and materials and has sought to develop a nuclear weapons capability. It
was the primary gateway for the countless foreign fighters who
infiltrated into Iraq and killed our troops. Assad and his lieutenants
have the blood of hundreds of Americans on their hands.

Many in
Washington fear that what comes after Assad might be worse. How could it
be any worse than this?

The end of the Assad regime would sever Hezbollah’s lifeline to Iran,
eliminate a long-standing threat to Israel, bolster Lebanon’s
sovereignty and independence, and inflict a strategic defeat on the
Iranian regime. It would be a geopolitical success of the first order.
More than all of the compelling moral and humanitarian reasons, this is
why Assad cannot be allowed to succeed and remain in power: We have a
clear national security interest in his defeat. And that alone should
incline us to tolerate a large degree of risk in order to see that this
goal is achieved.

Increasingly, the question for U.S. policy is not whether foreign
forces will intervene militarily in Syria. We can be confident that
Syria’s neighbors will do so eventually, if they have not already. Some
kind of intervention will happen, with us or without us. So the real
question for U.S. policy is whether we will participate in this next
phase of the conflict in Syria, and thereby increase our ability to
shape an outcome that is beneficial to the Syrian people, and to us. I
believe we must.

The President has characterized the prevention of mass atrocities as,
quote, “a core national security interest.” He has made it the
objective of the United States that the killing in Syria must stop, and
that Assad must go. He has committed the prestige and credibility of our
nation to that goal, and it is the right goal. However, it is not clear
that the present policy can succeed. If Assad manages to cling to
power—or even if he manages to sustain his slaughter for months to come,
with all of the human and geopolitical costs that entails—it would be a
strategic and moral defeat for the United States. We cannot, we must
not, allow this to happen.For this reason, the time has come for a new policy. As we continue
to isolate Assad diplomatically and economically, we should work with
our closest friends and allies to support opposition groups inside
Syria, both political and military, to help them organize themselves
into a more cohesive and effective force that can put an end to the
bloodshed and force Assad and his loyalists to leave power. Rather than
closing off the prospects for some kind of a negotiated transition that
is acceptable to the Syrian opposition, foreign military intervention is
now the necessary factor to reinforce this option. Assad needs to know
that he will not win.What opposition groups in Syria need most urgently is relief from
Assad’s tank and artillery sieges in the many cities that are still
contested. Homs is lost for now, but Idlib, and Hama, and Qusayr, and
Deraa, and other cities in Syria could still be saved. But time is
running out. Assad’s forces are on the march. Providing military
assistance to the Free Syrian Army and other opposition groups is
necessary, but at this late hour, that alone will not be sufficient to
stop the slaughter and save innocent lives. The only realistic way to do
so is with foreign airpower.

Therefore, at the request of the Syrian National Council, the Free
Syrian Army, and Local Coordinating Committees inside the country, the
United States should lead an international effort to protect key
population centers in Syria, especially in the north, through airstrikes
on Assad’s forces. To be clear: This will require the United States to
suppress enemy air defenses in at least part of the country.

The ultimate goal of airstrikes should be to establish and defend
safe havens in Syria, especially in the north, in which opposition
forces can organize and plan their political and military activities
against Assad. These safe havens could serve as platforms for the
delivery of humanitarian and military assistance—including weapons and
ammunition, body armor and other personal protective equipment, tactical
intelligence, secure communications equipment, food and water, and
medical supplies. These safe havens could also help the Free Syrian Army
and other armed groups in Syria to train and organize themselves into
more cohesive and effective military forces, likely with the assistance
of foreign partners.

The benefit for the United States in helping to lead this effort
directly is that it would allow us to better empower those Syrian groups
that share our interests—those groups that reject Al Qaeda and the
Iranian regime, and commit to the goal of an inclusive democratic
transition, as called for by the Syrian National Council. If we stand on
the sidelines, others will try to pick winners, and this will not
always be to our liking or in our interest. This does that mean the
United States should go it alone. We should not. We should seek the
active involvement of key Arab partners such as Saudi Arabia, U.A.E.,
Jordan, and Qatar—and willing allies in the E.U. and NATO, the most
important of which in this case is Turkey.

There will be no U.N. Security Council mandate for such an operation.
Russia and China took that option off the table long ago. But let’s not
forget: NATO took military action to save Kosovo in 1999 without formal
U.N. authorization. There is no reason why the Arab League, or NATO, or
a leading coalition within the Friends of Syria contact group, or all
of them speaking in unison, could not provide a similar international
mandate for military measures to save Syria today.

Could such a mandate be gotten? I believe it could be. Foreign
capitals across the world are looking to the United States to lead,
especially now that the situation in Syria has become an armed conflict.
But what they see is an Administration still hedging its bets—on the
one hand, insisting that Assad’s fall is inevitable, but on the other,
unwilling even to threaten more assertive actions that could make it so.

The rhetoric out of NATO has been much more self-defeating. Far from
making it clear to Assad that all options are on the table, key alliance
leaders are going out of their way to publicly take options off the table.
Last week, the Secretary General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said
that the alliance has not even discussed the possibility of NATO action
in Syria—saying, quote, “I don’t envision such a role for the alliance.”
The following day, the Supreme Allied Commander, Admiral James
Stavridis, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that NATO
has done no contingency planning—none—for potential military operations in Syria.

That is not how NATO approached Bosnia. Or Kosovo. Or Libya. Is it
now the policy of NATO—or the United States, for that matter—to tell the
perpetrators of mass atrocities, in Syria or elsewhere, that they can
go on killing innocent civilians by the hundreds or thousands, and the
greatest alliance in history will not even bother to conduct any
planning about how we might stop them? Is that NATO’s policy now? Is
that our policy? Because that is the practical effect of this
kind of rhetoric. It gives Assad and his foreign allies a green light
for greater brutality.

Not surprisingly, many countries, especially Syria’s neighbors, are
also hedging their bets on the outcome in Syria. They think Assad will
go, but they are not yet prepared to put all of their chips on that
bet—even less so now that Assad’s forces have broken Homs and seem to be
gaining momentum. There is only one nation that can alter this dynamic,
and that is us. The President must state unequivocally that under no
circumstances will Assad be allowed to finish what he has started, that
there is no future in which Assad and his lieutenants will remain in
control of Syria, and that the United States is prepared to use the full
weight of our airpower to make it so. It is only when we have clearly
and completely committed ourselves that we can expect other countries to
do the same. Only then would we see what is really possible in winning
international support to stop the killing in Syria.

Are there dangers, and risks, and uncertainties in this approach?
Absolutely. There are no ideal options in Syria. All of them contain
significant risk. Many people will be quick to raise concerns about the
course of action I am proposing. Many of these concerns have merit, but
none so much that they should keep us from acting.

For example, we continue to hear it said that we should not assist
the opposition in Syria militarily because we don’t know who these
people are. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeated this argument
just last week, adding that we could end up helping Al Qaeda or Hamas.
It is possible the Administration does not know much about the armed
opposition in Syria, but how much effort have they really made to find
out—to meet and engage these people directly? Not much, it appears.

Instead, much of the best information we have about the armed
resistance in Syria is thanks to courageous journalists, some of whom
have given their lives to tell the story of the Syrian people. One of
those journalists is a reporter working for Al Jazeera named Nir Rosen,
who spent months in the country, including much time with the armed
opposition. Here is how he describes them in a recent interview:

The regime and its supporters describe the opposition, especially the
armed opposition, as Salafis, Jihadists, Muslim Brotherhood supporters,
al-Qaeda and terrorists. This is not true, but it’s worth noting that
all the fighters I met … were Sunni Muslims, and most were pious. They
fight for a multitude of reasons: for their friends, for their
neighborhoods, for their villages, for their province, for revenge, for
self-defense, for dignity, for their brethren in other parts of the
country who are also fighting. They do not read religious literature or
listen to sermons. Their views on Islam are consistent with the general
attitudes of Syrian Sunni society, which is conservative and religious.

Because there are many small groups in the armed opposition, it is
difficult to describe their ideology in general terms. The Salafi and
Muslim Brotherhood ideologies are not important in Syria and do not play
a significant role in the revolution. But most Syrian Sunnis taking
part in the uprising are themselves devout.He could just as well have been describing average citizens in Egypt,
or Libya, or Tunisia, or other nations in the region. So we should be a
little more careful before we embrace the Assad regime’s propaganda
about the opposition in Syria. We certainly should not let these
misconceptions cause us to keep the armed resistance in Syria at arms
length, because that is just self-defeating. And I can assure you that
Al Qaeda is not pursuing the same policy. They are eager to try to
hijack the Syrian revolution, just as they have tried to hijack the Arab
Spring movements in Egypt, and Tunisia, and Libya, and elsewhere. They
are trying, but so far, they are failing. The people of these countries
are broadly rejecting everything Al Qaeda stands for. They are not eager
to trade secular tyranny for theocratic tyranny.

The other reason Al Qaeda is failing in Tunisia, and Egypt, and Libya
is because the community of nations, especially the United States, has
supported them. We are giving them a better alternative. The surest way
for Al Qaeda to gain a foothold in Syria is for us to turn our backs on
those brave Syrians who are fighting to defend themselves. After all,
Sunni Iraqis were willing to ally with Al Qaeda when they felt desperate
enough. But when America gave them a better alternative, they turned
their guns on Al Qaeda. Why should it be different in Syria?

Another objection to providing military assistance to the Syrian
opposition is that the conflict has become a sectarian civil war, and
our intervention would enable the Sunni majority to take a bloody and
indiscriminate revenge against the Alawite minority. This is a serious
and legitimate concern, and it is only growing worse the longer the
conflict goes on. As we saw in Iraq, or Lebanon before it, time favors
the hard-liners in a conflict like this. The suffering of Sunnis at the
hands of Assad only stokes the temptation for revenge, which in turn
only deepens fears among the Alawites, and strengthens their incentive
to keep fighting. For this reason alone, it is all the more compelling
to find a way to end the bloodshed as soon as possible.

Furthermore, the risks of sectarian conflict will exist in Syria
whether we get more involved or not. And we will at least have some
ability to try to mitigate these risks if we work to assist the armed
opposition now. That will at least help us to know them better, and to
establish some trust and exercise some influence with them, because we
took their side when they needed it most. We should not overstate the
potential influence we could gain with opposition groups inside Syria,
but it will only diminish the longer we wait to offer them meaningful
support. And what we can say for certain is that we will have no
influence whatsoever with these people if they feel we abandoned them.
This is a real moral dilemma, but we cannot allow the opposition in
Syria to be crushed at present while we worry about the future.

We also hear it said, including by the Administration, that we should
not contribute to the militarization of the conflict. If only Russia
and Iran shared that sentiment. Instead, they are shamelessly fueling
Assad’s killing machine. We need to deal with reality as it is, not as
we wish it to be—and the reality in Syria today is largely a one-sided
fight where the aggressors are not lacking for military means and zeal.

Indeed, Assad appears to be fully committed to crushing the
opposition at all costs. Iran and Russia appear to be fully committed to
helping him do it. The many Syrians who have taken up arms to defend
themselves and their communities appear to be fully committed to
acquiring the necessary weapons to resist Assad. And leading Arab states
appear increasingly committed to providing those weapons. The only ones
who seem overly concerned about a militarization of the conflict are
the United States and some of our allies. The time has come to ask a
different question: Who do we want to win in Syria—our friends or our
enemies?

There are always plenty of reasons not to do something, and we can
list them clearly in the case of Syria. We know the opposition is
divided. We know the armed resistance inside the country lacks cohesion
or command and control. We know that some elements of the opposition may
sympathize with violent extremist ideologies or harbor dark thoughts of
sectarian revenge. We know that many of Syria’s immediate neighbors
remain cautious about taking overly provocative actions that could
undermine Assad. And we know the American people are weary of
conflict—justifiably so—and would rather focus on domestic problems.

These are realities, but while we are compelled to acknowledge them,
we are not condemned to accept them forever. With resolve, principled
leadership, and wise policy, we can shape better realities. That is what
the Syrian people have done.

By no rational calculation should this uprising against Assad still
be going on. The Syrian people are outmatched. They are outgunned. They
are lacking for food, and water, and other basic needs. They are
confronting a regime whose disregard for human dignity and capacity for
sheer savagery is limitless. For an entire year, the Syrian people have
faced death, and those unspeakable things worse than death, and still
they have not given up. Still they take to the streets to protest
peacefully for justice. Still they carry on their fight. And they do so
on behalf of many of the same universal values we share, and many of the
same interests as well.

These people are our allies. They want many of the same things we do.
They have expanded the boundaries of what everyone thought was possible
in Syria. They have earned our respect, and now they need our support
to finish what they started. The Syrian people deserve to succeed, and
shame on us if we fail to help them.

wHoA!

h0t!

~hEy Y"all! DoN"t MiSs GsGf~!

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